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The Breakfast Meeting: Lucas Hands Off to Disney, and a Storm’s Online Power

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The Breakfast Meeting: Lucas Hands Off to Disney, and a Storm’s Online Power

By Noam Cohen October 31, 2012 9:42 amOctober 31, 2012 9:42 am

The Walt Disney Company strengthened its position in fantasy entertainment on Tuesday by purchasing Lucasfilm — George Lucas’s company, which made the “Star Wars” films — for $4.05 billion in stock and cash, Michael Cieply reports. The move follows a string of similar acquisitions, including the $4 billion deal for Marvel Entertainment in 2009 and the $7.4 billion purchase of Pixar Animation Studios in 2006.

Disney said it planned to release a seventh “Star Wars” feature film in 2015, with new films coming every two or three years. (Mr. Iger said Disney acquired a detailed treatment for the next three “Star Wars” films as part of the acquisition.) Also, the company said it saw great potential in selling “Star Wars” merchandise worldwide.

The combination of two pop-cultural institutions (Disney and Star Wars) was easily mocked online, but the hard-core fans on a forum at TheForce.net were often sympathetic to Mr. Lucas and his decision to move on. One wrote: “What if he just wanted it all behind him, where he couldn’t have an opinion anymore and could truly, utterly relax?” Another noted that in a New York Times Magazine profile this year, Mr. Lucas spoke of the pressure of tending to the “Star Wars” franchise:

Lucas seized control of his movies from the studios only to discover that the fanboys could still give him script notes. “Why would I make any more,” Lucas says of the “Star Wars” movies, “when everybody yells at you all the time and says what a terrible person you are?”

The punishing winds and flooding from Hurricane Sandy on Monday night knocked out a range of Web sites whose servers sit in Lower Manhattan, including The Huffington Post, part of AOL, Quentin Hardy and Jenna Wortham report. The Huffington Post was back up by Tuesday morning, but others, including Gawker, were still down. The destructive storm nonetheless illustrated the vulnerability of computer networks, particularly in Manhattan, where aging infrastructure and tight space force “servers and generators to use whatever space is available.”

NY1, the local cable news channel, made a comforting and informative companion during Hurricane Sandy’s arrival on Monday night, Jon Caramanica writes. Other local stations also went into round-the-clock storm coverage, but theirs tended to be more frenetic. NY1 has a 20-year-old style of unflashy, steady news coverage. Mr. Caramanica writes:

The plan seemed to be to find someone — a correspondent, a spokesman, a politician — with something to say, and stick with that person until someone else wanted to speak. One by one, they took their turn, everyone from Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo to Joseph J. Lhota, the chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, to representatives of Con Edison and various local elected officials, speaking at length, and often in detail, and often until cut short by a dial tone or a burst of silence when the connection was lost.